Ken Perry

Founder

Ken Perry was born and raised in Concord, CA surrounded by a supportive family and amazing group of friends. In 1995, he married the girl of his dreams and headed off to finish college in Denver, CO with a BA in Speech Communication. It was in college that Ken found his fascination with research, and his passion for speaking through the debate team. He competed and coached at the highest level and fell madly in love with learning. In 1997, Ken created his first website for a mass communication class. The site would allow people to post things they wanted to sell. Then, others would connect with those people to buy things from them. Ken shut that down after getting his “A” and has regretted killing what would have been “Ken’s List” ever since!

He, with his Bachelor’s, and his wife, with her Masters, headed back to California where he did what any good speech communication major would do… tended bar at a local brew pub while thinking there must be something bigger than this for him.

One day his friend Mark Shaffer asked him if he wanted a real job. Ken was confused because he HAD a real job. Then Mark told him about his clients in the mortgage industry who were “rolling in it” and, with his wife’s encouragement, Ken took the interview and became a loan originator for a national company in Pleasanton, CA.

Ken immediately started reading guidelines realizing that if he wasn’t an expert he would not be successful. He quickly became the top producer at the company and was asked to take a training leadership position to onboard branches throughout the western half of the U.S.

Ken realized he could not be everywhere at once, so he created his second innovative, collaborative web based system called “The House of Knowledge”, an intranet for uploading training materials, quizzes, and more. It was 1998.

In 2000, Ken transferred to the Pacific Northwest to take a sales job with a major wholesale lender. That allowed him the opportunity to call on originators throughout the Portland market. He found himself saddened by the lack of training for originators, so in 2003 he left a high paying job and started Broker Knowledge Group with his Mother-in-Law, Pam. In September of that year, he was invited to speak at a conference, and that led to more and more speaking gigs throughout the country. In 2005, he became the first private company to be approved to teach live continuing education classes in Oregon. With the passage of the SAFE Act in 2008, these continuing education classes became required in every state. Broker Knowledge Group was one of the first providers approved, and the company took off like wild fire.

In December 2011, Ken attended a technology conference in Vegas that changed his life and rewrote the future of his business. In 2012, with the guidance of his business partner Frank, a partnership with two amazing men named Dan and Larry, a spectacular sales director named Gwen, an organizational wizard named Yvonne, and of course, his very special mother-in-law Pam, Ken launched The Knowledge Coop®, a social learning system that allows companies to upload and assign documents, videos and notes and grow their companies through collaboration and education. This is Ken’s third cutting edge web innovation, and the one for which he is most proud.

Ken lives in Camas, WA with his wife of 18 years, and the most amazing three kids you could ever meet!